Keen On

Dick Cheney died four weeks ago, but his dark legacy lives on—quite literally—at Guantanamo Bay. The human rights lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan was among the first attorneys to enter the notorious prison in 2004, and what he found there shattered every official justification for its existence. The “worst of the worst”? Most detainees were never even accused of acting against America. Many were simply sold to the Americans for bounties. The sophisticated interrogation program? Techniques copied from Chinese and Soviet methods designed to extract false confessions, not intelligence. In his new book Through the Gates of Hell, Colangelo-Bryan tells the story of his unlikely friendship with Jaber Mohammed, a Bahraini detainee who spent years in captivity for the crime of being an Arab man in the wrong place (Afghanistan) at the wrong time (post 9/11). Released without apology or compensation—just a form asking him not to “rejoin” organizations he’d never belonged to—Jaber now lives in Saudi Arabia with four childr